TPU-GAN: Learning temporal coherence from dynamic point cloud sequences

Point cloud sequence is an important data representation that provides flexible shape and motion information. Prior work demonstrates that incorporating scene flow information into loss can make model learn temporally coherent feature spaces. However, it is prohibitively expensive to acquire point correspondence information across frames in real-world environments. In this work, we propose a super-resolution generative adversarial network (GAN) for dynamic point cloud sequences without requiring point correspondence annotation. Our model, Temporal Point cloud Upsampling GAN (TPU-GAN), can implicitly learn the underlying temporal coherence from point cloud sequence, which in turn guides the generator to produce temporally coherent output. In addition, we propose a learnable masking module to adapt upsampling ratio according to the point distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on point cloud sequences from two different domains: particles in the fluid dynamical system and human action scanned data. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method on upsampling task as well as learning temporal coherence from irregular point cloud sequences.